The Poem as Icon

Many of the certainties that we were trained in, both in literary studies and in linguistics, have been falling away over the last few years. The questioning of arbitrariness, one of the key and apparently unshakeable foundations of modern linguistics, has been the most challenging and revelatory shift. In critical literary studies, there has been a long-standing, core acceptance that form and meaning were randomly separate, at every level of language from phonology to discourse, and that therefore there can be no describable stable meanings, no repeatable experiences, no concepts that are not relativized, and discourses that only compete ideologically and at the level of rhetorical ornamentation. We are beginning to see that these consequences are false because we can no longer rely on a presumption of arbitrariness. Cognitive science, in particular, has been demonstrating over and over again that it is iconicity that drives language, communication, and aesthetics, not those few aspects of these phenomena that are trivially arbitrary.In The Poem as Icon, Margaret H. Freeman draws on a long career of thinking in and around cognitive poetics to present this definitive statement of iconicity. Though the main arena of discussion is circled by poetry and aesthetics, in fact Freeman's arguments run far beyond these matters, encompassing language, science, religious thinking, and human experience. The book is a distillation and demonstration of the central importance iconicity has in human cognition: it combines clarity of argument with startlingly insightful analyses of a range of literary works.In defining iconicity and the icon, Freeman persuasively argues that our use of cognitive as a premodifier to a range of new disciplines can be seen historically as a defensive contrast to each of several prior failed, narrow intellectual enterprises—principally in so-called theoretical linguistics. She proposes a shift in worldview to emphasize that our collective human insight into cognition is the unifying factor, and different disciplines are simply different modes of exploring the same cognitive faculty. So, in the field of the cognitively informed understanding of literary works, cognitive poetics is recast as “poetic cognition.” In turn, this is a special case of aesthetic cognition. These arguments are set out with elegant clarity in the opening chapter.Freeman goes on in subsequent chapters to take a thematic principle, which is set out with equal richness, and which is then exemplified by a detailed set of instances of poetic analysis. So, in the second chapter, the icon is defined from the vantage points of semiotics, cognitive linguistics, religious discussion, and popular usage. Iconicity is explored as the key to the “felt reality” of representations of the world. This simulation is not mimesis, as chapter 3 goes on to argue, but based on semblance—the active simulation of a previously non-visible sense of being in reality.The importance of metaphor in cognitive understanding of language and literature is the theme to the chapter that follows, where Freeman emphasizes the dynamic and creative nature of “metaphoring.” She argues and demonstrates how self-involving this is, drawing the established cognitive linguistics of metaphor together with the theory of blending, or compression, to show how some metaphorical blends can themselves become icons in culture and thought. The role of schematized knowledge in the readerly experience of sensate elements is then explored, followed by an illustration of how the prosodic effects of literature can create an icon of something previously hidden or unnoticed. Creativity, imagination, and reason, and their interdependencies for aesthetics, are the subjects of the final two chapters. These begin with a restatement of the intellectual reach of the book: “By restoring the primacy of the sensory-motor-emotive underpinnings of our experiences, feeling is invested with form and form with feeling. It is this that creates the possibility of the poem as icon” (122).Throughout each of these chapters, the initial arguments and themes as set out above are richly demonstrated through some brilliant analyses: poetic works are explored by, for example, Alexander Pope, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, W. S. Merwin, Brendan Galvin, William Blake, Sylvia Plath, Li Bai, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Wei Ying-wu, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rainer Maria Rilke, and of course work by Freeman's perennial favorite, Emily Dickinson. This range is not set up to be representative of all types or movements of poetry; otherwise it would be possible to query the predominance of Euro-American white male voices here, with exceptions. However, the point of the discussions is to show the application and depth of the argument about icon and iconicity. In this respect, the book also, perhaps accidentally, stands as an exemplary guide toward undertaking your own similar explorations in poetic cognitive analysis. There is a very useful and illuminating glossary at the end, which further supports this possible use of the book. Further, although it is not usual for a book review of this sort to comment on the index, nevertheless the richness of the indexed items is exceptional and worth noting. It is worth noting too—and this is otherwise a sad reflection on publishing generally in the United States—that the physical book itself is beautifully produced and is a tactile object of art in its own right: Oxford University Press has done a fine job with the Cognition and Poetics series.Overall, The Poem as Icon distills many ideas in cognitive poetics and in Freeman's developing thought that have been drawing together for many years. The book ends not only optimistically and expansively but also on a philosophical note that is almost transcendental. Bringing together William Blake, the biblical Eve, and Stephen Hawking from their different domains of visionary poetry, religious iconography, and cosmological physics, and together with other poetic voices, Freeman concludes by arguing for the transformative power of art, its persistence, and its role in both self-knowledge and our experience of all reality. Her argument includes the sciences within her view of aesthetic cognition. Although the means is absolutely contemporary and alive to our collective insights from current cognitive science, the conclusion is one that would be recognizable to almost all of the poets across the centuries whose work and thought have been encountered along the way: poetry and the poetic are centrally important in our intellectual, bodily, and emotional lives

Aesthetics · Arbitrariness · Art · Epistemology · Icon · Iconicity · Linguistics · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology